Frank: The Voice (18 page)

But he would soon have the spotlight all to himself. Beginning in May, the band was booked to play the Astor’s gloriously posh roof garden—it had a thousand-foot tree-lined promenade, with lights twinkling like stars among the branches. For New York’s glitterati, the Dorsey stand was a much-anticipated event. Sinatra too was all aflutter. The Astor was Class with a capital
C
, and the singer, who from an early age craved class just about as much as he craved sex (but found it much more unattainable), was more nervous than he had ever been about a gig. It was one thing to play the Paramount, with its great sea of undifferentiated faces; it was quite something else to entertain the rich at close hand. He could depend on a certain number of swooning teenage girls (it was prom season), but the audience at the Astor would mainly consist of grown-ups—wealthy, arrogant, jaded grown-ups. With an exquisitely calibrated social sense born of deeply held feelings of inferiority—Italians had risen in the American public’s estimation since Marconi and Toscanini, but not much—Sinatra felt an entirely reasonable fear of what he was up against.

Still, fear got him excited. And on opening night, Tuesday, May 21, 1940, he got the Astor excited. The band’s first number featured Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, and—as was distinctly not the case when he shared the stage with Haines—his respect for his co-performers led him to vocalize selflessly and beautifully. It was yet another string to Sinatra’s bow. “
When you sing with a group, it takes a certain amount of discipline, and Frank was excellent at it,” Jo Stafford said. “You can’t wander off into your own phrasing. You’ve all got to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Very few solo singers can do that. He could. When he sang with us, he was a Piper, and he liked it, and did it well. I don’t know any other solo singer, solo male singer especially, that can do that.”

Of course he wasn’t like other singers. And on the next number, the hypnotically beautiful “Begin the Beguine,” the stage, and the song, were all his. And, as the twenty-three-year-old pianist Joe Bushkin, who’d just joined the band in April, recalled: “
He wound it up with
a nice big finish, and the place went bananas!” The formerly jaded crowd, which had stopped dancing to listen, was screaming for an encore—but “Begin the Beguine” was the only solo feature Sinatra did with Dorsey at the time.

Canny showman that he was, Dorsey put his own ego on hold and stopped the band. If they wanted an encore, they’d get one. “
Just call out the tunes,” he told Sinatra, “and Joey will play ’em for you.”

This went fine for three or four numbers, Bushkin said—until Sinatra turned around and said, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The lovely Kern-Harbach tune has a notoriously tricky middle section, a chord modulation that looks great on paper but can be hell to pull from memory. Under pressure, Bushkin simply blanked. “
Next thing I know,” he said, “Frank was out there singing it all by himself … a capella. I was so embarrassed. I mean, Jesus, all the guys were looking at me, so I just turned around and walked away from the piano!”

The cream of New York society—gents in dinner jackets; dames in gowns; a few hundred fancy prom kids, all dressed to the nines—stood hushed, craning their necks to see, while the skinny boy with the greasy hair filled the big room with song, all by himself.

“And that is the night,” Joe Bushkin said, “that Frank Sinatra happened.”

Just two days later, Dorsey, and a stripped-down core unit that he called the Sentimentalists, went into the RCA recording studio in Rockefeller Center and took another stab at a number they had tried, without much success, a month earlier. The song, a mournful ballad written by a pianist named Ruth Lowe in memory of her late husband, was called “
I’ll Never Smile Again.” The May 23 version moves at a dreamy-slow tempo. It begins with a piano intro, followed by the perfect five-part harmony of the four Pied Pipers, plus Sinatra, singing the first stanza and a half—“I’ll never smile again, until I smile at you/I’ll never laugh again”—and then Sinatra comes in alone: “What
good would it do?” he sings, aspirating the initial “wh” of “what” with such plummy, Quinlan-esque precision that it comes out “hwat,” a pronunciation that would not have sounded amiss to any of Cole Porter’s society swells.

It sounded just great to America. When the record came out five weeks later, it quickly shot to number 1 on the
Billboard
chart—the first number 1 on the first
Billboard
chart—and stayed there for twelve weeks, turning Frank Sinatra into a national star. Meanwhile, on the strength of Frank’s éclat, the Dorsey band’s initial booking of three weeks at the Astor was extended to fourteen.

Did Tommy Dorsey come up with more solo ballads for Sinatra to sing? You bet he did. Just like that, the cart was pulling the horse.

Frank with Dorsey and the band in his first MGM musical,
Ship Ahoy
. Buddy Rich is on the drums, Tommy leads, Jo Stafford and her fellow Pied Pipers are behind the piano.
(photo credit 8.2)

“Hey, Bing, old man. Move over. Here I come.” Recording with Dorsey’s musicians, but, pointedly, no Dorsey. Frank is the star on this session. Los Angeles, January 19, 1942.
(photo credit 9.1)

M
eanwhile. On a Saturday evening, June 8, Nancy Sandra Sinatra was born at the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City. “
Dad was in Hollywood with the band,” Nancy Sinatra writes in
Frank Sinatra: An American Legend
. In fact, Dad was not in Hollywood with the band—he was at the Hotel Astor with the band,
Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, six miles as the crow flies from Jersey City, a million miles as the native son flies.

“
I hated missing that,” Sinatra told an interviewer years later, sounding as strangely cold-blooded
—that—
as if he were talking about missing a certain cocktail party. “It was just a taste of things to come, man. When I think of all the family affairs and events I would miss over the years because I was on the road.”

If that last sentence looks incomplete, it’s because Sinatra didn’t finish the thought.
¹

Frank and Big Nancy, as she would now forever be known, named Tommy Dorsey as Baby Nancy’s godfather. Of course, it was Frank’s idea.

Four nights later, on an NBC radio broadcast from the Astor roof, Sinatra sang “I’ll Never Smile Again” to another houseful of upper-crusters. The air check of the number reveals a small but striking difference from the recording: on the radio version’s out-chorus (the last words sung in the song), as Sinatra sings “Within my heart, I know I will never start/To smile again, until I smile at you,” he uses the vocal trick he’d discovered back at the Rustic Cabin, a breathy little catch in his voice, in this case before the initial
h
of “heart.” It’s a small thing, a showman-like touch that would have made no sense on a recording but all the sense in the world before a live crowd—a naked play for the hearts of the rich girls in the audience. Calculated, and thoroughly effective.

They watched him, and he watched them. Taking five during the fast numbers, standing by the piano, “
Frank would tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Check the action out!’ ” Joe Bushkin recalled. “Some gal with a lot of booze in her would be shaking it up on the dance floor … Whenever he could take a shot at a woman he would.”

In the beginning it had been both pretty ones and not-so-pretty ones. He didn’t have to settle so much anymore. They were getting prettier all the time.

“
It must have been sometime in 1940,” Sammy Cahn wrote in his memoir. “He told me how unhappy he was being a married man. I gave him the George Raft syndrome. ‘George Raft has been married all his life. Put it this way—you’re on the road all the time, you at least can go home to clean sheets.’ He kind of understood that.”

“
Tommy Dorsey came up to see the baby,” Ed Kessler remembered. “I thought my sister was gonna fall out the window.”

Kessler was twelve in the summer of 1940. His family lived in a brown-brick apartment building at 12 Audubon Avenue in Jersey City; Frank and Nancy Sinatra, and now Baby Nancy, lived just upstairs. It was a nice, leafy neighborhood, around the corner from the State Teachers College and just across from Bergen Park.